Christ’s Resurrection is the culmination of a message, a mystery and a memorial of everything Christ had announced, promised and lived/died for.
This is “the day the Lord has made.”
It was the “first day of the week” and the first day of the “new creation.” Mary Magdalene saw the empty tomb – “they have taken away my Lord! John, too, saw the empty tomb with the linen folded and “seeing it, he believed!” The Lord has risen! Alleluia.
It took the apostles some days or weeks, with the help of the fire and thunder of the Holy Spirit, to put together the memories, message and mystery of this ‘new creation’ and, twenty centuries later, it is left to each one of us to remove the tombstones that keep some of our lives and hopes buried underground.
The Lord has risen. Let the children be free to dream and grow unimpeded by a hostile world. Let adolescents understand the meaningless injustice of the world around them.
The Lord has risen for those parents whose God-given procreative powers have often been challenged and denied. The Lord has risen for the poor of the world, and the sick and victims of human violence and selfishness.
Easter Sunday is the high point of the church year. It is also the only time of the year that is decided by the phases of the moon. Easter always falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon o after the spring equinox. It sounds complicated, but there is a reason behind planning the date this way. It connects Easter with the Passover, the time that the gospel tells us that Jesus died.
From those of us in the northern hemisphere, this also means that Easter coincides with spring. Christ has risen and the whole world springs to life. An ancient hymn of St. John Damascene describes Easter as the “spring of seasons bright” after a long winter of our sins. New green shoots break the surface of the earth, finches put on their Easter gold, and the smell of lilies fills the air. The connection is a helpful one. It reminds us of the creative power of God.
But the connection between springtime and Easter can be misleading because spring is natural. Resurrection breaks into our world in ways no one expects. The first Easter with Mary Magdalene at the tomb is not the kind of Easter Sunday we are used to celebrating. There are no hymns proclaiming ‘Christ is risen!’ There are no sung Alleluias. There are no lilies. There are no congregations in their Easter best. There is Mary, alone, standing next to the tomb. Not even she expected resurrection the first Easter Sunday.
The gospel tells us that Mary stands by the tomb in the dark. Her mood seems to reflect the same darkness – “They have taken the Lord from the tomb…” Her hope is dead. Her future is gone. Mary stands in the dark at the tomb of her friend. The natural thing to do when someone we love dies is to grieve first and then try to go on with life the best you can. But Easter tells us a different story. We gather on Easter trusting that something unnatural has happened.
In the verses immediately after our gospel reading, Jesus gives Mary a message. He tells her an Easter message for all of us. He says, “Go to my brothers and tell them, ‘I’m going to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’.” The resurrection not only changes Jesus; it changes all of us. As St Paul says in his letter to the Colossians, the handwriting against us has been nailed to the cross.
We do not need to go out and tell others how bad they are. We need not leave here and live as judges or rulers or persecutors of others. Instead, Jesus makes us children of God through his grace. That is the life we are to live. Together with Mary Magdalene and the disciples, we are called to bear the good news.
The friends of Jesus were devastated when he died. They called him Master, Lord, Teacher. He had called them friends. They had given up everything to be with him. Now he was gone forever. Darkness covered their whole lives. Suddenly they saw him – he was alive! We cannot replicate that original experience. But we can, through meditating on it, place Jesus in the center. And once we rejoice in his happiness, his joy will spread over our whole lives.